Live chat for the travel industry: Don’t let your travellers leave you

Imagine this; a customer really wanted to purchase a holiday package. He came to your website, selected one, but he needed some more info before the booking. He tried to call you by dialling your customer care no but was told to call after some time as all of your customer care agents are busy in assisting others. Being frustrated he left your website and naturally you lost that customer.

This is why engaging with your website visitors for offering instant assistance is very important. Adding live chat support for website can help you to do so. In the online travel industry, as a customer support system, live chat differentiates websites which will continue to grow by providing instant assistance to customers from the other ones providing very poor visitor experience. Because of the convenience of online booking, like other sectors, travel and tourism industry also is growing rapidly. Now the travellers have started looking for more convenience and they tend to prefer those travel websites which provide the best customer experience.

Compared to other traditional support mediums like phone calls or email, where one agent can serve one customer at a time, a live chat agent can handle multiple chats. So in this way, the requirement of keeping extra agents can be eliminated which in other way helps to save the overall costs for online customer support.

Let’s discuss how live chat can eliminate the issues, your visitors are facing:

Website navigation problem

Updating the design of your travel website does not mean that your website visitors will be able to easily browse the travel options, select and then book. Even mobile responsive websites with great design can often be difficult to navigate by both the tech savvy and general crowd. But with the help of live chat for online customer support, someone on your website itself will be able to offer help much before they think about it.

Information overload in the travel market

With such a saturated market, full of hotels, flight and travel operators comparison sites, there is huge amount of info for the potential buyers to read through. So no doubt the competition is also huge. In such a scenario, if you can’t offer them something extra then you never know they may leave you and check some other travel websites.

When a visitor comes to your website to check the best travel deals, he or she must be having queries regarding your offerings, best deals and so on. With ‘Proactive Chat’, one of the unique feature of live chat support for website, you can directly engage with your website visitors to offer instant assistance. You may have all the info buried in several places of the website which the website visitor is not able to find but with the help of live chat software, your live chat agent can easily guide him to find those answers and help to get on his way to booking.

Try to engage to stop website abandonment

Do you know that the major reason for cart abandonment is the payment issues? According to WorldPay, ‘11% of basket abandonments are because of a payment being declined.’

Let’s take one example. Just think that a prospect customer has got all the required info in your website for planning his holiday. Out of the whole online travel industry, he has decided you as his No 1 choice. He is about to book your holiday package but during online transaction, his card details get rejected. He tries to look around for instant customer support services, but does not get one. Being frustrated he leaves your website and starts checking some other travel & tourism industry websites. If live chat solution was there, with your friendly support agent, this disaster could be easily avoided.

Suvashree is responsible for handling the website content, blog and social media marketing activities at REVE Chat. Graduated in English literature, she has done her Masters in Journalism and Mass Communications. Her interests include reading, painting and travelling.